It’s the first day of the 2026 NFL season.
Well, the first official football Sunday.
You know what I mean.
Modern football (or at least the modern football experience) is one of those things, like iPhone apps or video games- that is wholly unrecognizable from even a decade ago.
Who Cares About the NFL?
Tell you what- I sure didn’t used to care.
Perhaps it was the Long Island upbringing.
Sure, we send guys to MLB and we’re becoming a true rising hockey hotbed (😊), but football is really nbd where I’m from.
Friday Night Lights culture, the kid from the neighborhood getting the D1 offer with a shot at the league...just doesn’t happen where I’m from, unless of course you’re D’Brickashaw Ferguson.
(Although I will say from doing social media and making friends across the country, the Friday night games/homecoming culture does seem like an awesome way to grow up)
Anyhow.
The NFL.
For most my life, it was a “meh..” in my book.
So let’s take a trip to 2016 to better understand this.
NFL Week 1, 2016
Talking like I actually remember who played, I have no idea.
This is right around the time that I devised my lowkey brilliant (not gonna gatekeep) idea of syncing my Sunday lifts with the intersection of the Giants and Jets games, and I’d basically have the whole weights section to myself.
Football Sunday was a ritual, and my friends had begun to partake in a routine that I found to be a mortal sin- calling Saturday night early so that they’d be fresh for an NFL RedZone Sunday marathon.
Calling it early on a night out surrounded by good music and beautiful women so they’d be fresh and spry to loaf in a basement, inhaling pizza and Lord knows what else while they watch a bunch of guys the same exact age ram into each other at 25 miles an hour and make millions of dollars.
Ok, I’ll admit it- this is sort of where I started to hate NFL football.
Maybe it’s the internal Holden Caulfield life radar that I can’t seem to shake (that was especially prevalent in my 20’s), maybe it was my mortal allergy to inauthenticity.
Guys spending time watching some unreal physical specimen make the wrong 60 yard throw, then yucking it up at the office cooler on a Monday morning talking about how they’d have checked it down instead.
Same guys who would need to call the local fire department to rescue them from beneath a bodyweight bench press attempt.
Like, make it make sense!
And then…..Fantasy Football.
Oh my goodness.
Here was the final frontier of NFL fandom: grown men frantically refreshing an app, privately rooting for their friend’s running back to pull a hamstring.
Saying things like “I need him to get eight more targets,” with surgical precision.
There was also this aside: I watched guys who really were not that sharp all of a sudden have analytical rigor I’d never seen outta them before.
It’s like that scene in Holes when they find out Zero can spell… Hey man, what else can you do??!?
I genuinely could not understand it.
You’re telling me that a sport I already found vaguely fake and over analyzed had now become an all-week administrative responsibility?
All from the same guys that would walk past a storefront of a game shop, see Dungeons & Dragons players and call them dorks, btw.
I think that’s the funniest part.
Except, of course, I eventually became one of them.
Not the guy hoping for an ACL tear because he needs six more fantasy points.
(I maintain at least some dignity.)
But somewhere along the line, the thing I found so ridiculous became one of the most compelling cultural products in America.
So what changed?
In Comes the Internet
Sure, we had Twitter discourse back in 2016.
Teams had their fandom tribes online.
It’s nothing like it is today.
Football discourse online has mutated into its own thing, a highly entertaining firefight of super critics that have coined such clever and absurd lingo that you can’t help but be amused.
System QBs.
Garbage time merchants.
Fraud watch.
Fake teams.
If you told me ten years ago you could be legitimately clowned online for literally winning the Super Bowl I’d have thought you were insane.
Meme culture’s grasp on the game is admittedly both insane and sometimes terrific.
The memes can be OD and unfair…..but sometimes they’re not:
There’s also the coupling of our ever-dwindling attention spans, which is just brutal towards the players.
I remember strolling around the Raymond James Stadium concourse at the Bruins v. Lightning outdoor game last year, and you’d have thought Drake Maye was playing hockey that day.
The reverence the Boston contingent had for this man bordered on how the Vatican treats the Pope.
Maye had a poor game a few nights ago, and the IG comments under the Patriots’ game result post were legit shocking.
This man was a borderline deity 7 mere months ago!!
But hyper-reactive brainrot NFL internet doesn’t care.
Same contingency that claimed Jalen Hurts, who “talks like a fortune cookie”, frauded his way to winning the 2025 Super Bowl.
It’s all so ridiculous- and extremely entertaining.
The NFL Has Style Now
This is a big one.
For most my life, I made the correlation that NFL= dudes that look and dress like Ben McAdoo.
That’s usually what it was.
Obviously, there have always been stylish football players.
Every sport has its outliers.
But that wasn’t what the NFL seemed to be.
The culture was always football guy: practical, loud, sloppy.
If you cared about supposedly meaningless things like clothes, style, grooming, or self-presentation, you were less manly.
Now?
The tunnel walk has become part of the show.
Guys arrive in tailored suits, vintage denim, leather jackets (terrific), designer bags, a clean sneaker, and outfits so aggressively put together that you have no choice but to give respect.
And I love it.
I can’t get enough of the uniforms, either: the throwbacks, the color combinations, the helmets, the clean road whites.
I have been mocked by friends for caring about which uniform a team is wearing in a game I am otherwise not all emotionally invested in, which is always an interesting occurrence.
A nice little casual throwback to tired late-2000s locker room quasi-homophobia, to which I used to retort with equally juvenile boasts of conquests, but now I let it just roll off my shoulders.
Point is- the traditional culture still can seep through.
Am I so wrong, though?
I mean look at the L.A. Chargers, for crying out loud:
Each combo is a masterpiece unto itself.
Presentation matters. It always has, in all walks of life.
Football finally decided to admit it.
It wasn’t just the aesthetic brain that’s drawn to modern football- there are a lot of lessons to be learned in the personal branding space, too.
The Players Became Their Own Companies
The modern NFL player is a personal brand, a fantasy asset, a betting variable, podcast guest, outfit inspo, and…if he’s really in his bag- a small holding company.
Long gone are the days where the only offseason notoriety came from dating a celebrity, an awards show appearance, a trade, or a facepalm-inducing legal situation.
These new guys are entering the league at 21 years old with a pocketful of NIL money, a personal content strategy, a team of people around them, investments, endorsement deals, real estate interests, streaming platforms, and so on and so forth.
Sometimes they even own venture funds, à la Saquon Barkley or Aaron Rodgers.
This is not the ESPN 30 For 30: Broke NFL you and I grew up with.
Guys now score touchdowns on Sunday, promote some (maybe questionable) blockchain platform on Monday, appear on a podcast Tuesday, and will be back in some crazy viral tunnel fit by Thursday night.
Maybe that sounds dystopian.
Honestly, it kinda is.
But it is also really compelling.
The NFL has become an arena where the most athletically freakish people on the planet are trying to turn a relatively short career into a lifelong business.
That’s pretty cool.
Now let’s look at the last aspect of the modern game, the giant elephant in the room, the engine behind it all:
GAMBLING.
Gambling has not merely been added to the NFL.
Gambling has rewired the way basically everyone experiences it.
Walk into any bar during any game, and you’ll see it.
“I need 3 targets and over 60.5 yards from this guy in the first half!”
Big group celebrations over a random 2nd and 7 screen pass and gain of 4.
Look, societal effects aside, it was a marketing masterstroke.
Nobody (despite how cool the color rush uniforms were) outside of the team’s markets was getting excited about a 2016 late-season edition of Thursday Night Football featuring the Jags and the Titans.
Now?
That game is a myriad of possibilities, riddled with prop bets galore.
There are live lines on the screen, boosts in every commercial break, and odds attached to nearly every player action.
The broadcast deliberately leans into it.
Sure, there’s the obvious downside to this.
We all know gambling can be destructive and addictive.
But that doesn’t change the fact it’s arguably the main driver of modern football fandom.
(Kinda funny how much fandom sounds like findom…but I won’t go there)
Back to Football Sunday
The version of me in 2016 who looked at NFL Sunday as an excuse to have an empty gym and not much else has changed drastically.
Today, I’ll have an eye on the absurdity and mud-slinging over on X.
The TikTok discourse about who is a fraud and who is legit, the videos of fights in the stands, the tinfoil hat monologues about Sunday Night Football being rigged.
There will be articles about players’ investments into growth stage companies to read, tunnel fits to gain inspo from en masse, teams doing battle in awesome uniforms on primetime television.
It’s unusual, it’s entertaining, it’s how we live now.
However, the most interesting thing about this all?
How it relates to…
The Big Picture
Maybe all this is why the modern NFL experience feels so intoxicating to me.
It is basically a concentrated version of the culture we all live in now, on full display.
People gamble not just because they like football. That small dopamine hit feels like a path ahead. It gives some semblance of control.
We obsess over presentation because more and more of our social world is digital, visual, and permanently available for judgment.
We become hypercritical (even of success!) because having an opinion has become a form of participation and provides the catharsis of emotional release all at once.
We are drawn to the players who turn themselves into brands, investors, and miniature corporations because, in a way, we are all being taught to view ourselves that way too.
The line between “person and product” gets blurrier by the day.
And above all, we want something to distract us.
Something to track, argue about, and frantically refresh.
Something to build a little identity around, and briefly care about with unreasonable intensity.
Tribal rooting interests meets 0.5 second attention spans meets 6-leg DraftKings parlays meets insane prop bets beats X Stan culture meets aesthetic poasting meets new-age FOMO.
The modern NFL just happens to be exceptionally good at packaging all of that into one 12-hour Sunday window.
That’s the spectacle that captivates my culture nerd brain.
Enjoy the games today.
🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈
9.13.2026
What a nice Sunday treat
I love you, John, but those Chargers uniforms are an affront to my eyeballs.